Electronic Musician has an article up called Twelve under a Hundred on inexpensive VST synthesizers: lo and behold, my Neumixtutrautonium plugin made it! (The list is not an absolute top 12 just a list of the free synths they tried and liked the best.)
This is despite all my best efforts: after someone complained about some minor detail in the beta user interface I got ticked off and created one based on bananas and surfboards which several people, to my enormous pride, have claimed is the ugliest interface ever. (The website has the picture transposed with another synth.) I also put most of the labels in real or fake German, had no manual, and gave it really difficult name. But even my marketing genius has not stopped the indefatigable Leo Sasso: thanks Leo!
Neumixtrautonium is based on the late, great Oskar Sala's instrument the Mixtur-trautonium, which used his subharmonic synthesis method. Playing up and down the keyboard, some notes are notes but others are more like chords. So you have to make the tones to suit the lines you are playing, or vice versa.
There is actually a family of synthesizer techniques which are all emulatable with a set of oscillators in parallel, sometimes with AM from the master signal (such as VOSIM method), or sometimes with resonant filters (such as the Mixtur-trautonium uses. I have been playing with VOSIM recently: very nice filter sweep sounds, vocals and clavs: the difficulty is figuring out how to control the parameters.
The article gives the price of $29-95, but actually I don't have a mechanism for paying, so it is nominally donationware but effectively free.
Here's the list of the synths (each with their method or distinctive feature):
- Vocal (formant filters)
- Crystal (layered sounds with multi-stage envelopes)
- Scanned Synth (kind of physical modeling)
- SynthMaster (highly configurable analog)
- Alpha3 (analog with waveform morphing)
- Pocus (additive with particle interface)
- Modelonia (physical modeling-ish)
- Soup (additive vector)
- Vanguard (analog)
- Neumixturtrautonium (subharmonic)
- Microtonic (drums)
- Zoyd (analog waveshaping)
I've only tried Crystal of these, and it is wonderful. That's one of the nice thing about VSTs: at the cheap end of town, you cannot predict the quality or exoticism or interest of the sound from the user interface.
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Comments (2)
Read More Entries by Rick Jelliffe.
Paul: The relationship between the different tone components is integer, but there are knobs for tweaking the frequency to get what Sala called "neighbour" tones: the knobs called "nachbar" do that.
For the scales that are played from the MIDI, one of the GUI pages has a series of buttons that let select a root note and then adjust the temperament from each note in the scale from that note. The adjustment is made in terms of "short cents" rather than cents, which fit better into historical and natural tunings.
For example, make the root C and the Vth +2, and you will get an effectively beat-free interval when playing C and G on the keyboard. Make IV -2 and the same for when playing C and F. Now if you do the same around the cycle of fifths you come to a problem when they meet: F# and C# will be fairly dissonant; and when you play a major or minor third, it may certainly sound strange.
So I use a different strategy: adjust the tuning for the particular music being played. Figure out which chords will make the music sound best when they are in perfect tune, and adjust for them. For example, if your main chord is a major seventh, adjust III and V to be beat free with I, then adjust VII to be beat free with III or V. If you play a lot of sus4s, then use the kind of cycle-of-fifths tuning above.
The trouble with the way that temperaments have been communicated to musicians is that they are given as a list of historical names, Werkmeister III for example. I think modern electronic musicians have failed to get the message about why you use alternative temperaments: it is to make the music sound better, not to get some strange effect necessarily. Many musicians are aware of how a perfectly in-tune guitar does not exactly match with a piano or synth; if you let the guitarist tune each note to the piano the guitar is not perfectly in tune after...this is a temperament problem: the problem of finding an average tuning that corresponds to the exact tunings that you can get between strings of, say a guitar. That is why I didn't provide built-in historical temperaments by name: the user can have fun figuring out the best temperaments by ear.
The other reason for providing scale adjustment is that the trautonium was a string instrument in a sense: the user didn't play a keyboard but rather one (or two) strings. This allowed freedom with pitch and sliding, which comes down to the player's ear choosing the effective temperament.
Sorry, I don't have plans to port it to the Mac. You can simulate it with a virtual modular synthesizer toolkit by synching four oscillators to a master oscillator. Have a set of switches adjusted to add fixed voltage increments to select a subharmonic (i.e. we are simulating subharmonics by synching faster oscillators to a lower oscillator and using exact numbers to get the same speed as would be obtained by dividing a higher note). Have a switching system to select between banks of these switches. Use exponential saw rather than saw. Put resonantors (BP filters) in each path. Add a pitch shifter and reverb.
That's very cool. It's also cool that it seems to use Just Intonation. ("Subharmonic synthesis uses frequency dividers to create new waves whose frequencies are whole-number divisors of the source wave.")
Will you be porting it to Mac?
I also noticed that Sonic Charge MicroTonic, which is a favorite of mine, also made the list.